Positive Jobless Claims No Matter How You Look At It

This morning’s jobless claims report showed that initial claims dropped to 366K, which is the lowest weekly reading since May 2008. On a non-seasonally adjusted (NSA) basis, jobless claims fell 96K to 433K from 529K. While that number is considerably higher than the seasonally adjusted number of 366K, it is important to view it in the context of the historical NSA numbers.

The chart below shows the weekly NSA initial jobless claims going back to 2000. Each dot in the chart represents the weekly reading for the first full week of December in each year. As shown, this week’s level of 433K was the lowest reading for the first full week of December going all the way back to 2007.